GB-London: Exploring, understanding and evaluating experiences of Fitness to Practise at the GDC

The GDC invites tenders for our research project. The research outcomes will enable us to understand and improve the experiences of those who are participants in the Fitness to Practise process (FtP), including their needs for support. It will also enable us to explore from first-person perspectives how the principles guiding our fitness to practise function are understood and applied.

The aim of the research is to understand and learn from the experiences and perspectives of the people who have been directly involved in GDC fitness to practice processes in order to:

-inform and underpin our work to understand and respond to the support needs of informants, witnesses and registrants as they progress through the fitness to practise process.

-inform and underpin our ongoing ambitions to promote the principles of right touch regulation in our FtP processes, including proportionality, consistency and transparency.

-inform our upstream strategy, which focuses on the prevention of harm rather than enforcement activity, including identifying insights to inform learning and action on the part of professionals to reduce levels of FtP concern raised.

Underpinning the research aim are four primary objectives:

-provide an important foundation for future research, monitoring and evaluation plans.

-Understanding mechanisms and impact: to learn from participants at each stage of the FtP process what the impacts of their involvement are and what are the mechanisms for those impacts. This will include learning on how specific groups of participants in FtP are impacted differently.

-Understanding support needs: to learn from all those involved in FtP cases, and particularly informants, witnesses and registrants, what their support needs are, what works to support them in the current approach and where there is need for improvement. This will include learning to support equal access and fairness for all stakeholders.

-Defining right touch regulation: to understand from the perspectives of those directly involved in FtP cases what it means for a regulator to apply the principles of right touch regulation and how this feeds into and fits with the developing GDC approach to right touch regulation

-Sustainability: during and as a result of the research, to develop approaches, processes and use methods that can be trialled and tested at GDC to contribute to ongoing research, monitoring and evaluation that could be adopted by GDC and used in all aspects of inquiry-based learning, reflective practice, transparent reporting and for a range of research purposes.

We expect the project to last no more than 18 months. We anticipate the value of the Contract will be no more than £130,000 including any expenses but exclusive of VAT.

For further information, please see the invitation to tender documents; which are available to download from the Delta e-sourcing portal (access code: )